30 St Mary Axe

Interesting facts

Builders on the site found the skeleton of a teenage girl from Roman London, about 1,600 years old; she was reburied at the foot of the tower in 2006.

Because the dome left no room for lift machinery on the roof, the main lifts stop at the 34th floor and a separate lift pushed from below continues higher.

The tower's fully triangulated steel frame makes it stiff enough to resist wind sway without the mass dampers many skyscrapers need.

The nickname Gherkin was already in use by 1999, years before the building was finished.

In 2004 the Stirling Prize jury chose it unanimously, the first unanimous decision in the award's history.

In 2005 a survey of the world's largest architecture firms voted it the most admired new building in the world.

Tenants who added glass partitions for security stopped the natural ventilation through the light wells from working as designed.

On clear days the tower is visible from the M11 motorway about 32 kilometres away and from Windsor Great Park in the west.

It has appeared in films including Match Point, Basic Instinct 2 and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Why it is worth it

30 St Mary Axe, known to everyone as the Gherkin, gave London its first great piece of twenty-first-century skyline. Designed by Foster + Partners with the engineers Arup and built by Skanska, it was completed in December 2003 and opened in April 2004: 41 storeys and 180 metres of tapering glass in a spiral diagrid of steel. In 2004 it won the Stirling Prize, Britain's most prestigious architecture award.

The tower stands on a site with a painful history. The Baltic Exchange, the old shipping market, occupied it until an IRA bomb in St Mary Axe badly damaged the building in April 1992. Its salvaged hall and facade were eventually sold and taken to Tallinn, and an earlier plan for a 386-metre Millennium Tower on the site was abandoned as out of scale. The glass dome at the very top of the new building, called the Lens, deliberately recalls the glass dome of the old Exchange hall, much of which is now shown at the National Maritime Museum.

For all its curves, the building contains only one piece of curved glass, the lens-shaped cap at the apex; everything else is made of flat panels arranged in a spiral. Gaps cut into each floor create six spiralling light wells that bring daylight deep into the offices and were designed to ventilate the building naturally, helping it use about half the energy of a conventional tower. The top floors, crowned by the dome, hold a restaurant and bar with a 360-degree view over the City.

Getting there

The tower stands in the City of London, the financial district, on St Mary Axe, a narrow street running north from Leadenhall Street; Bethnal Green lies about 2 km to the northeast. It is an office building seen chiefly from the surrounding streets. The nearest airport is London City (LCY), about 9.5 km to the east.

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia

30 St Mary Axe, previously known as the Swiss Re Building, is a commercial skyscraper in London's primary financial district, the City of London. It is nicknamed The Gherkin after the vegetable of the same name due to its shape. It was completed in December 2003 and opened in April 2004. With 41 floors, it is 180 metres (591 ft) tall and stands on the sites of the former Baltic Exchange and Chamber of Shipping, which were extensively damaged in 1992 in the Baltic Exchange bombing by a device placed by the Provisional IRA in St Mary Axe, a narrow street leading north from Leadenhall Street.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia